


The Man but not The Light

by JeanLuciferGohard



Category: Gideon the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Gen, hashtag Justice4ColumAsht, i had to type these character tags with my oWN HANDS, like an ANIMAL, tfw you hung your whole identity on a peg you're no longer sure you believe in
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-22
Updated: 2019-10-22
Packaged: 2020-12-28 02:49:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21129533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JeanLuciferGohard/pseuds/JeanLuciferGohard
Summary: Some people don’t understandanything. They see the man but not the light-Richard Siken, "The Way the Light Reflects"Colum Asht makes his way back to his body. It's a long road home.





	The Man but not The Light

_ I bid you return. _

Colum Asht walks the banks of the River. Something crunches beneath his feet; silty gravel, white as teeth. Maybe they are teeth. All the time he has spent walking the River, looking very carefully down at the scarred, pale tops of his boots, looking nothing in the eye, Brother Asht has never been able to work out which it is.

The light is thick, but somehow faintly translucent, in the way of a dead-man’s eyelids or a thinly-sliced pear. 

The River is white. Things move beneath its surface, murky and serpentine until they resolve into something like reaching hands, or glass, cobwebby with fractures, or the flanks of whales. But not really any of those things; the scale of them alone, at once too enormous and too small, makes the concept of  _ possession _ , of  _ having  _ any features at all, seem painfully absurd. 

They bleed white, also. Brother Asht knows this because he has cut one of them. It is a long way back, and they do not want to let him go.

_ I bid you return. _

Colum Asht was sixteen when his mother’s brother was born, and he stood, shoulder to shoulder with  _ his _ brothers, waiting. The memory of it is slippery.

He wants to remember that the newborn Silas Octakiseron did not cry out when they pricked his tiny finger, only stared with luminous, cut-glass eyes too big for his infant face while the Templars of the White Glass fed his blood into a handheld device, which whirred and chirped. 

But that isn’t true.

The newborn heir to the Eighth cried, open-mouthed and uncomprehending, so loud that Brother Asht barely noticed when they called  _ his _ name from among the assembled.

B negative.

And that was the last time Colum Asht saw his necromancer bleed.

_ I bid you return. _

The business with the Ninth Cavalier was ill-done, thinks Brother Asht. He thinks, as he has thought every time he has come to the River, that this time, he will not go back. Let Silas do whatever it is he does with his body while Colum isn’t in it, and just stay here and die horribly, all at once, instead of slowly. Brother Asht has lost three molars to dry-mouth and immuno-supressant drugs, but the thing of it is that he has known Silas from birth. Brother Asht, waking to his body with a cottony film on his tongue and a migrainous throb in his temples, can still see the man inside his Uncle’s awful radiance.

Brother Asht sighs, stooping to shake a pebble out of his worn, serviceable boot. Brother Asht is a serviceable man, if not a good one. Brother Asht made a promise, once, shuddering through a fever, but still faithfully choking down immuno-supressants. Silas was only nine then, the sweetness not yet burned out of him by Holy Fire. Silas thought Brother Asht  _ was _ his brother, and refused to leave Colum’s bedside, praying thin, piping vigils at all hours. And so Colum Asht promised not to leave, not ever.

He stands.

He walks.

_ I bid you return. _

“Brother Asht,” says Silas, nodding serenely. He glows, antiseptic and self-satisfied.

Colum Asht passes his dry, dusty tongue over his cracked lips. There is a man inside the glow of the Master Templar, and a boy somewhere inside that, and Colum used to think he might be the only person who could see it.

He forces himself to look harder.

“Hello, Si.”

**Author's Note:**

> hit ya bitch up on [tumblr](thefaustaesthetic.tumblr.com) or [twitter](twitter.com/gin_n_chthonic)


End file.
